Talk:Learning Learning/Parable 1/Finger

I think that this is a great project so the following is offered as constructive input to thinking about how to optimise the effects on humanity over the next 30 years.

IMO The computer is not the finger, it's the hand which will contain the fingers in whose indicated directions the child will look. The moon may or may not be in the direction the fingers are intended to point OR in the direction the child sees the fingers as pointing.

The point (sorry) here is the obvious one that the computer is meaningless without its content, its network connections and the familial, cultural and social context in which the child interacts with it.

How, by whom and at what scale will decisions be made, as they will have to be, about the content on the computer itself and in/on the network, if such is intended, to which the computer will connect.

Will content change as its owner matures? With what social and cultural assumptions will the content be imbued? Is this a one size fits all cultures effort? I would strongly hope not. Recent Western educational experience, and experience with indigenous cultures within Western societies, can be interpreted to show the deleterious effects on children of calling into question their social and cultural values at too early a stage in their intellectual and social development.

Our development as a species certainly depends on the more widespread development of trans-cultural values in human individuals, but that can only happen in a healthy way in individuals who have a strong sense of their own intrinsic worth. That sense, of course, is utterlty dependent on their sense of their culture's intrinsic worth.